Saddled and burdened by an electoral consequence of a fatal collective blunder, the political space grizzles the inaction of a motley collection of duffers in the vineyard of a supposed meister. In activating our civic devoirs and democratic covenant, we created a plethora of value deficits in our electoral judgments that led us to this stalemate and suspended-animation. The complex signals of confusion to the voters, some days before the polls, coming from revered political hierarchy, compelling massive support for this man of luck, made victory attainable for impostors in power and slow-witted personages.
It was a political error by the command masters who misread the nuance of the fortunate chap by falling for his theatrics and melodramatics. A man that was unsure of even a razor-thin victory ended up being congratulated for his massive ‘good luck’ at the polls. In a rare show of incongruous jubilation, two parties of incompatible identities, roared into ecstasy of perfidy, celebrating the fall of a serial contender of the khaki memory and a noisy cleric of latter fame that was his deputy. And paradoxically, the party that issued the proclamation on vote-transfer engaged in this kerfuffle without even obliging its own representative, that was the collateral damage of this strange overnight cooperation, a deserving sentiment. Not too long, the web of fraternity between the incompatibles became tangled with cracks when sharing the spoils of their pyrrhic victory. Withdrawal. Lamentations. Disappointments. And then, a requiem.
Divorced, the beautiful bride during the election, the one that added value to the one that lacked value, went back to the “khaki groom”, a member of the septuagenarian club, to consummate a new romance to dislodge the lucky dude from his rock of refuge. Politics, like computer, can also reboot. The masters of the game, who made the initial blunder, are restarting again hoping that this time around, the citizens can have ‘a piece’ of the action from these collapsed conglomerates and experimental amalgam. This is another narrative for a prophetic morrow.
Settled within his rock of luck with the patience of his choice, the lucky man is unruffled about the breach of covenant. He is unrepentant in his default in the creation of dividends both in kind and in cash for the people that entrusted their collective destinies into his hands. He has breached covenant. He has breached trust. And latching on the citizens’ generous spirit of forgiveness, he is reclining in the indulgence of a return, dismissing the immorality of the content of his intention with putative immortality.
Four years in the saddle, the two years inherited from a deceased master and two years of electoral charity, the citizens are inured to the spectacle of power intrigues and power base consolidation. The people with the power of vote have been subdued by the same men they invested into power with their votes. Projections and calculations of 2015 are unsettling the polity with cacophonous distractions. They have not finished the one they are eating they are contemplating how to eat the one they are projecting. Excluded from the equation of recompense, and piqued by their abandonment by this assembly of middling leaders, the people are concluding that their misfortune was caused by the suspect appropriation of their collective fortunes by the same man parading his medal of luck in every balcony of might. Shocked and stunned that this government is a milchcow for parasitic midges sucking the content of the national vault, the citizens, joined by international sympathisers, are worried by the scope and scale of corruption in government. Elaborate and systematic larceny is becoming a metastasis and we-the people-are agitating for a chemotherapeutic surgery to halt this dangerous slide of emptying the nation’s fiscal larder.
We have a government that we are not feeling. There is a government but there is no governance. There are no dividends but there are divisions. Our government is too distant from us. There is a disconnect. No blood is flowing between the people and their government. The only blood that is flowing is the blood of innocent citizens that are victims of the monstrous creations of the state: Boko Haram, ritualists, kidnappers, armed robbers, hired killers and other collective machinery of terminations.
Tortured by the guilt of reneging on its promise of providing plentitude for the people, this mingy government, notorious for its putz around mentality, punctuated its inaction, in a fright of rage during the fuel price increase, with a puzzled contemplation of what it called palliatives as if the citizens are not worthy of permanent healing or a prophylactic attention by the government.
The popular refrain, chorused by all invading military ragamuffins when substituting one for another during the inglorious years of military charade, was that our hospitals had become mere consulting clinics. Though when departing into eternal confinement, the military never upgraded the “consulting clinics”, it is tragic that even now, 14 years into democracy, our hospitals are still glorified clinics and government health policies and reforms are revolting and risible. They are patronising of the citizens but fall short of addressing their health challenges comprehensively. Assuaging the plight of the citizens in the area of transportation during the roll-out of the “palliative regime” under SURE-P, the government gave out new buses but it never addressed the condition of the roads the buses would ply. Most of the federal highways are in terrible condition. The craters, gullies, pot-holes and canals that dot our highways are a reflection of the insensitivity of the government to the hardship the people go through. To now imagine that citizens will have to travel six to ten hours on these roads of ‘yahooze’ shape shows how much indeed the government loves its citizens!
The many surgeries done to the power sector that had consumed trillions of naira still leave the nation in the dark and to the generosity of the moon. The fluctuating megawatts have become a bottomless pit to the nation’s treasury with heaps of naira filling this pit of eternal darkness with no trace of light at the bottom of the pit. Every prognosis of improvement and every prophesy about increase in megawatts has somersaulted like a marble on the precipice. What can a nation do without power? And lack of it is responsible for a new phenomenon called GEJ paralysis-a situation of national lull caused by government’s inaction over its energy-related problems, where citizens’ activities are diminished, or more poignantly, demobilised by a dysfunctional hydroelectric technology.
A greater puzzlement of our national catastrophe is the castration of its future; a condition that leaves a substantial percentage of its youths roaming the streets without any prospect of being compensated for their acquired skills, expertise, education, artistry and talents. Disturbed by this legacy of moping morass exhibited by the present crop of leadership, my fear is that national leadership is on a steady decline if the witnesses of today’s leaders are the natural successors of the present non-performers.
Obasanjo’s statement in Jigawa that “you can help somebody to get a job, but you cannot help him to do the job” had a tinge of sarcasm and ego-triping. But a deeper reading locates the statement in a philosophical context more serious than Obasanjo’s egoism. When providence places you in a position you never expect to find yourself because of some obvious limitations, or in a position higher than your mental resource, it is you, not providence, that will have to show that you deserve the benevolence of providence by doing the work you got through “good luck”. Constructed on electoral happenstance, and not on any past historic exploits, need we ask again the reason(s) for the failure of luck.
